Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [77]
LIBERAL IMPERIALISM ANDNEW DEMOCRACY
The new freedom to meet and to march had raised political expectations to fever pitch. Victor Purcell, together with a number of other ‘wise Britishers’, was for a short time lionized by the Chinese press for having endorsed the ‘Eight Principles’ of the Malayan Communist Party. He was now facing intense criticism from his British colleagues: a senior policeman wrote to Mountbatten demanding that Purcell be removed from his post with immediate effect.87 But Purcell reiterated in a radio broadcast that ‘Liberty of speech is allowed which extends to the right to criticize government measures of policy in the strongest terms.’88 A few days after Tan Kah Kee’s return, Purcell left Singapore to travel around the peninsula to take in the political air. His impressions were recorded in an irreverent personal journal, which he circulated to senior members of the BMA. Intended to rally support for the liberal experiment, it began to chart its demise.
Purcell went first to Malacca, the ancestral home of Malaya’s largest community of Straits Chinese. It was, he observed, ‘still the same old Sleepy Hollow’. But surrounded by antique Chinese mansions and an air of decline, Purcell saw how the Straits Chinese elite had lost a great deal of their wealth and influence to newer men. At Malacca’s ‘Double Tenth’ celebrations, the triumphal arches for the occasion were those erected to welcome the MPAJA a few weeks earlier; they had merely been reinscribed. As he moved north, the political atmosphere became heavier. Kuala Lumpur ‘had an unquiet air’: Purcell noticed the constant passage through the streets of MPAJA men. The centre of this frenzy of activity was the People’s Assembly which had been set up in the Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall. Here the communists had gone furthest in attempting to maintain a shadow local government, including a Treasury and a Department of Civil and Cultural Affairs. Although its core support remained Chinese, the Assembly had representatives from all the main ethnic communities.89 It was led by a hardened ex-guerrilla leader, Soong Kwong, who discarded the MPAJA’s preferred banditti battledress style of the previous weeks and cut a flamboyant figure in a pristine white linen suit.
Purcell arrived at a tense moment. The editors of the Min Sheng Pau had been rebuked by the military for criticizing arrests made in the police raids in Singapore a few days earlier. Then, on 13 October, 6,000 workers went on strike out at Malaya’s only coal mine at Batu Arang. This was a serious challenge to the British: before the war the mine had been the scene of Malaya’s most dramatic industrial unrest, and of the MCP’s first attempt to set up soviets. Purcell visited the mine and implored the workers to be patient. ‘The men’s reply was that they could not work on empty bellies. There was a deadlock.’ This triggered a wave of industrial action: in the small-town strongholds of the MPAJA there were processions led by guerrillas, with ardent young Chinese as flying pickets. In Singapore, on 20 October, 7,000 harbour workers protested at the return of the contractor system. But the strike here took on an entirely new dimension: British troops were embarking from the docks for Indonesia, and the labour gangs refused to load materials of war. The British declined to listen to what they perceived to be political demands. It was reported that the European manager threatened the men with arrest and three years’ imprisonment under military law. ‘If you people don’t want to work’, they were told, ‘we have British soldiers and Japanese prisoners of war.’ The BMA drafted in 2,000 Japanese surrendered personnel, and over the next few days the strikes spread through the city to other transport and municipal workers, including the collectors of night soil and firemen; even 300 cabaret girls stopped dancing. At a vast rally of 20,000 workers at Happy World amusement park, fifty unions turned out